This one will take a while. And you've gotta cut us some slack. It's definitely a stretch of the imagination and occasionally steps outside the bounds of the possible. Like we give a rat's ass.
Also, it was written for Bruno and mailed to him only. All three of us loved it so much it had to be read aloud. And it was, both by me and Bruno. Me to anyone who didn't appear to be armed. Bruno read it to a group, including a nun, sitting around a dinner table. We're considering changing the name of the main character to protect my innocence. More on that tomorrow.
I gave the main character an Italian name to poke fun at Bruno. But used my own name as a base with the idea being I can make fun of myself and it doesn't piss me off 'cause I know I don't mean it. I considered writing a letter on the life of St. Bruno in the style of Lives of the Saints. A close look at da Vinci's The Last Supper reveals the only image of Bruno ever portrayed. There, in the background, is the hazy image of a man entering a wash room. For years the washroom was thought to be for women and the figure entering, Mary Magdalene. A cleaning of the fresco in 1971 restored what appeared to be Harpo Marx leaning against the room's sign making it appear to read Men's Room. Bruno, a holy innocent klutz, and a sight gag for da Vinci, is now thought to have been caught in mid-stride on one of his many trips that evening. Today he is no longer found in the Lives due to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in the Sixteenth Century. Should he ever be reintroduced, Bruno's feast day would fall on every thirteenth February 29th unless it was an odd numbered year. A vial of his urine lies within an altar in Krakow.
Last note, like I've said, these things write themselves. No outline, no plan. Start with a seed and it grows:
Marco Pietro (1937- 2007)
Marco Pietro, born during the Great Depression in Less Evil, New Jersey, was the only child of Italian immigrants. One look at the lad let them know this was a mistake that needed no repetition. Marco attended grade school at St. Bruno, the Incontinent - where he made an early and continual impression on the teaching nuns.
"Filthy, filthy, filthy!" sighed Sister Mary Laborious, his 6th grade teacher. "One day he was acting up in class, I believe that the time I singled him out as one of the untouchables. Of course his acting up was an everyday occurrence. However, this time it was simply more than I could bear. I'm a nun, not a saint after all. I... to this day I regret having ordered him to get a grip on himself. His response? Simply disgusting! Marco could turn the most innocent of moments, moments meant to set him on the right path, into a demonstration of his peculiar and unique form of perversion. A twisted genius? Perhaps.
Sister Mary added in quiet finality, "May God have mercy on his sick, undeserving soul."
Reaching his early thirties, a miracle in itself, Pietro had developed into a kind of 20th century anti-Renaissance man. Marco exhibited extraordinary and completely unfulfilled abilities in a vast array of the unattempted. His were some of the most profound, meaningful and creative paintings never imagined or put to canvas, skyscrapers and domiciles that never left the end of his unsharpened pencil, brilliant hypothesis in physics he never quite got around to and captivating literature never written except in miniature on the grout between the eye-height grout in public restrooms. Some, no, make that most, would agree he was a complete waste of molecules.
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